A pilot imprisoned for nearly eight months in the Dominican Republic for denouncing a plot to export 200 kilos of cocaine warns Quebec tourists who pass through Punta Cana airport.
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“I will never fly there again”, plague Robert Di Venanzo of Pivot Airlines, a small airline in Toronto. The team of I met him in the company hangar just over a month after his return to freedom.
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Robert Di Venanzo, captain.
On April 5, 2022, the captain and four crew members of Pivot Airlines were performing preliminary checks on their CRJ-100 twin-jet, which was to bring their seven passengers to Toronto airport.
An alarm, however, indicated that the hold located under the nose of the plane was not closed.
210 KG OF COCAINE
In wanting to close it, they discovered eight sports bags that contained 210 kg of cocaine.
The pilot immediately notified local authorities and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of his disturbing discovery.
“We thought we were doing the right thing, we even joked with the National Drug Control officers while she searched the device,” Commander Di Venanzo recalls.
Rather, it was prison that awaited the employees of Pivot Airlines.
GOLDEN PRISON
The crew and passengers were thrown into the overcrowded prison of Higuey about fifty kilometers from Punta Cana. Dominican justice seized their passports and prevented them from leaving the country pending a trial that will never come.
For the next eight months, airline employees were placed under house arrest. A team of armed guards had to change their hideout several times.
“We did the grocery shopping escorted by guys with submachine guns,” recalls Mr. Di Venanzo.
“It’s a real illegal detention,” says Dominican journalist and sociologist Lisandro Torres, who points out that the suspects have never been accused or questioned in this case and that they have never been tried.
ALTERED EVIDENCE
It took the genius of flight attendant Christina Carello to get out of this mess.
Looking at the airport surveillance camera footage filed in evidence, she noticed that 40 minutes of the surveillance camera footage pointed at the device had been deleted.
However, video from another camera showed a truck from the Punta Cana airport approaching the runway in the middle of the night, while the crew slept at the hotel.
The crew learned on November 11 that he was to be released. The prosecutor in charge of the case said that there was no longer enough evidence to hold a trial.
Pilots fear Punta Cana airport
Quebec pilots fear landing in the Dominican Republic since the unjustified imprisonment of a crew from Pivot Airlines.
“These pilots thought they were gone for three days and then left for eight months. It’s traumatic. I have no doubt that they will drag it with them for a long time, ”says the captain at Air Transat Dominic Daoust.
If he were faced with the same situation as the Toronto pilots, he would report the presence of the drug only when the wheels of his aircraft had left the ground.
“Me, I am not ready to take the risk with my crew and the passengers of subjecting them to all that”, he concludes.
The Canadian Air Line Pilots Association is also concerned.
“Our position is clear: an airline pilot should never have to choose between air safety and freedom. They did their job and were imprisoned for doing it properly,” says its president, Louis-Éric Mongrain.
RISKS AT THE AIRPORT
Recent events suggest the presence of a criminal group at the Punta Cana airport.
“There is a structure in this airport which ensures that there are drugs on planes and in suitcases… There is really a risk of transiting through this airport unfortunately”, alleges the Dominican journalist and sociologist Lisandro Torres.
A Belgian national is still in prison after employees at the Punta Cana airport were caught in the act of placing 50 kilos of cocaine in her luggage.